More Tales From SLU ER, Part…who knows, I’ve lost count

nick August 02, 2005 2 Comments

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Yeah, it’s been a while since I posted about workin’ in the ER so I thought it was time to do it again. Works out well, too since last week was so crazy what with the heat and all.

So to begin, there were a lot of heat related cases in general. A lot of headaches, exhaustion, dehydration…that sort of thing. Around 5 p.m. or so, this one patient came in by ambulance…WITH A TEMP OF 107.7! (Incidentally, the radio station we had on at the time). It was pretty bad because apparently your brain starts shut down when your temp reaches 105 degrees. So for 3 hours, I was busy with that one patient applying constant convection–procedures to lower body temp (i.e. constantly spraying his body with water, having fans on him, wiping him down, etc. etc.). That was in addition, to the regular stuff I have to do when a “trauma� patient arrives.

Anyways, I need to get back to studyin’ physics. It’s the last week and I can’t give up now, no matter how much I just wanna throw this stupid book away forever. I’ll be coming home a week from Monday, so I hope I can see you guys before we all go back to school for the fall term. Later!

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2 Responses to “More Tales From SLU ER, Part…who knows, I’ve lost count”

  1. scott said:

    Aug 03, 05 at 12:41 pm

    I didn’t know your brain starts to shut down at 105. Does that cause permanent damage? I’ve gotten pretty close to 105 before, like 103-104. I guess I should have taken it a little more seriously.

  2. nick said:

    Aug 04, 05 at 2:31 pm

    The nurses told me that a temp greater than 105 degrees is bad. I had never heard that before either. And that if you get up that high or higher, it needs to get brought down quick. Weird thing is that you can’t bring your temp down to quickly or you go into some kind of shock or something. So it has to be brought down slowly. We have a device–I can’t remember the name–the opposite of the Bear hugger(body warmer (i.e. increases your temp))–that works to lower your temp. But we didn’t use it because they wanted to control the rate at which his temp lowered or something.

    But yeah, supposedly above 105 and problems can start if it isn’t brought down.

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